About This Guide

Welcome to the University of Calgary’s OER by Discipline Guide. This resource lists a broad range of open educational resources (OER) organized according to the academic faculties and departments at the University of Calgary and where applicable, programs and subjects. The goal of this guide is to curate and organize quality OER so that faculty at UCalgary can easily find and source materials for their subject areas and courses. The guide will not remain static, instead it will continue to be populated and revised as new open educational resources are published, evaluated, and adopted.

The advantages and benefits that Open Educational Resources (OER) present for learners and educators addresses inequities around affordability, access, learner retention and diversity, and offers opportunities for creating, co-creating, and re-mixing content to suit teaching and learning needs. One of the barriers identified in faculty adoption and use of OER involves the time it takes to find suitable materials in their discipline.^[1]

To help alleviate some of the time and effort involved in finding OER to match the needs of educators at the University of Calgary, we have developed this guide to provide a targeted list of open educational resources organized by faculty, department, and sub-department or subject if applicable. The Open Educational Resources listed primarily consist of peer-reviewed, open textbooks and other open educational resource types. We have also included some Open Access materials, including journal articles and books, within this guide. Open Access materials with Creative Commons NoDerivatives (ND) licensing are different from OER as their licensing does not allow for remixing or adaptation as OERs do, however, they are free and open for use and access within course materials lists. We hope that this guide will serve as a helpful resource for faculty and other teaching staff with their selection of course materials and other educational needs.

If the OER listed in this guide do not suit your course and/or do not fulfill all your course material needs, Libraries and Cultural Resources also has the Open Course Materials Matching Service (OCoMMS) where library staff with search for other relevant open educational resources that may be available for your course and provide you with a list of curated materials based on your course outline and needs. You can access the Open Course Materials Matching Service (OCoMMS) Guide find out more about this service and to place a request through the OCoMMS Search Request Form.

Purpose of This Guide

This guide was developed to highlight quality open educational resources organized according to UCalgary’s institutional structure so that faculty, course coordinators, and other teaching staff can easily locate resources in their disciplines or subject areas.

We invite you to let us know if you discover a valuable OER in or related to your discipline that has not been included on the relevant department page. Contact us at oer@ucalgary.ca to let us know.

We hope that faculty and instructors find this guide helpful as they consider the options available for quality, open educational resources to adopt into their courses.

Note about YouTube Videos

Please note that most YouTube videos have a standard YouTube license, which means they are free to watch but can’t be downloaded or edited, however some videos which have Creative Commons licenses do have these permissions. To check a video’s license, look in the video description; if no license is listed then it has the default YouTube license; if it says “License: Creative Commons” then follow the conditions of the applied CC Licence.